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Monday, 28 May 2018

YOU'LL NEVER LIVE IT DOWN UNLESS YOU WHIP IT [111]

When you can no longer tell yourself that all will be OK in
the end, and how it can’t possibly get any worse, you confide in the relentless
march of time: it must be over soon.

The twenty-second amendment of the United States
Constitution means that Monday 20th January 2025 is the latest
possible date that Donald Trump must vacate the office of President, even if he
ends up serving two consecutive terms.

With the prospect of a Trump presidency lasting into my
forties – hell, “The Simpsons” may still be producing new episodes by then – I need
to plan for what lies ahead.

When the date of a meeting with North Korea was first
announced, I refrained from writing about a post-Trump world because I was
prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, even if I previously said that
was something he never needed before [link]. However, after the commemorative
coins were minted, Trump cancelled the meeting, then said it was back on, then
said “we’ll see,” then attacked “The New York Times” for the umpteen thousandth
time, I feel safe that the level of chaos Trump has created around himself is
enough to imagine I may, one day, be able to look past it.

I do not expect public discourse, let alone politics, to return
to how it was, because people have been emboldened by what Trump has said,
either in opposition or in agreement to them. It is all the news has become: racial
hatred, sexual assault, cultural wars, identity politics, immigration, democratic
processes, the due process of the law, and “alternative facts” – everything is
conjecture, everything is debatable, and we all have to live with that, apparently.

What I do know is that everything will find its centre, or
equilibrium once more, even if it has to make a new one, as people take stock
of where everything has reached. All the rhetoric of “drain the swamp,” and “Make
America Great Again” – originally Ronald Reagan’s slogan, without the inclusive
“Let’s” – implies that the core of what the United States was has been lost, or
destroyed, although you would only talk your own country down in the way Trump
has if you were insistent that you were the only person who could fix it.

The only reason I can feel sure of this, apart from hope, is
that this situation sounds a bit like what happened to the French philosopher
Jacques Derrida, as people failed to grasp his concept of “deconstruction,”
which he intended to be a continuing re-evaluation of Western values, as done
by previous philosophers, and not a destruction of them, with the intent of
making your own ones. Derrida had to explain that the notion of there being a “centre”
was a functional one, as there had to be a centre that helped to form our
understanding. Then again, when all you have is the text, the words, to hand,
you have to see them in the sense of how they have been used. For Trump, this
is all we have, no matter how badly it is presented, or spelled, on Twitter, in
a form that relies on impulsivity, ahead of deliberation, time, and thought.

I hope it is clear that this isn’t a repudiation of the way
politics is currently conducted in the United States, but of the way conduct is
currently conducted. The lessons that the next President may take from Donald
Trump may be to engage with their population in a similar way, or find
different ways, but any American who may feel the same as me, a non-American,
does not have a President that effectively represents them – we’ll just have to
wait and see how long before that changes.